Friday, October 31, 2014

Although we first posted about this exactly a year ago, we believe the staff at Keighley News have chosen a fitting news story for Halloween.

Emily Brontë’s “lost” novel has been published after she communicated from the grave with a modern-day writer.
This is the claim of Leeds woman Morwenna Holman, who says she collaborated with the ghost of the famous author of Wuthering Heights.
‘Spirit writer’ Morwenna last year published Westerdale after many hours speaking with “real perfectionist” Emily and has gone on to write a sequel entitled Heaton.
Morwenna’s communication with Emily Brontë began when she visited the Parsonage Museum at the age of 10.
She said: “Before then I had been seeing a young girl in period dress in my bedroom, but she never said a word to me.
“She did not frighten me I had been seeing spirits since the age of about eight.”
Morwenna said she recognised Emily from her portrait in the museum, and almost immediately she heard a voice telling her she had to write a special novel when she was older.
She said: “At the age of 18 my psychic powers reached their full strength and Emily told me I had to write her second novel, which was destroyed by Charlotte when she lay dying.”Westerdale is described as a tragic drama set in the wild landscape of the northern moors, detailing fear, aggression and rivalry between two families.
Morwenna said Westerdale took a year to complete.
She said: “Emily was a real perfectionist and hard to work with, but she brought such an essence of love that it made it enjoyable.”
In 2013, long after it was written by Morwenna, Westerdale was accepted by Olympia Publishers and it is now available on the website Amazon.
Morwenna said that in the intervening years she had worked with many other spirits, writing 10 of their life stories, but she recently collaborated again with Emily to write the famous woman’s third novel, Heaton.
Morwenna said: “For the first time I saw her smile as I unpacked the first precious editions of Heaton and in that smile was the warmth of the most wonderful spirit I have ever encountered.”
Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, said there was no firm evidence that Emily had written a second novel in her lifetime.
But she said that in 1871, an American author wrote a series of works allegedly dictated through a clairvoyant by famous writers including Charlotte Brontë.
Ann added: “This means Emily wasn’t the first. There’s a precedent for these sisters to write from the grave.” (David Knights)

Still on the Halloween theme, New Republic lists 'The 20 Most Terrifying Non-Horror Books You'll Ever Read'. Villette is a runner-up for the 'You're Convinced You'll Never Find Anyone Who Will Really Love You' category:

Villette by Charlotte Brontë: Lucy Snowe's love for her married fellow teacher is heartbreaking enough before you discover the story is based on Brontë's real-life story of being sent to Belgium alone to earn money to support her family. (Hillary Kelly and Chloe Schama)

TV presenter Alison Hammond and Aljaz Skorjanec will dance the American Smooth to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, and promised on Strictly spin-off show It Takes Two they will be Cathy and Heathcliff "with a twist".

Scary in a way, The Telegraph discusses 'Why Britons only really feel up when they’re down':

One major difference between a middle-aged British woman and her twentysomething self is that the older incarnation is cured of the notion she can make a man happy. By 46 she’ll have realised British males enjoy being harbingers of doom.
In fact, it’s something she should have noted in 1984, when every male she knew had Morrissey’s glumster anthem Heaven knows I’m Miserable Now on a loop. But back then, in her teens, she believed Jane Eyre’s happy fate was to rescue Mr Rochester. Over the course of the next three decades it will dawn on her that Eyre’s sole reward for this supposed rescue is a lifetime shackled to a blind would-be bigamist in his burnt-out mansion. But by then she’ll also realise she prefers stories that end “They all lived unhappily ever after.” Goodbye Charlotte Brontë, hello Val McDermid. (Rowan Pelling)

Describe the room where you usually writeI hire a modest garden shed built under an apple tree. On the wall hangs a microscopic photograph of Charlotte Bronte's quill pen – an artwork by genius Cornelia Parker.

The Huffington Post (Spain) interviews writer Santiago Posteguillo about his book and he of course can't help but also mention Jane Eyre:

Dear Ms. Fabricatore (my junior year English teacher),
I have completed reading "Jane Eyre" and am ready to discuss the various characteristics portrayed by Jane in respect to her relationships with Mr. Rochester and Saint John. Though I am 19 years late, can you please remove the INCOMPLETE from my assignment?
Sincerely, Jared
P.S. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner, but c'mon — look at the cover! It doesn't exactly scream "EXCITING READ!" And the first 100 pages does it no favors either. But the book picks up significantly towards the end of Jane's relationship with Mr. Rochester, and her dialogue with St. John is phenomenal. I was enraptured over the last 100 pages to see if Brontë would extricate Jane and return her to Rochester. The back-and-forth with St. John over his trip to India was masterful writing, and I was truly surprised how captured I was ... at least as much as Jane! (Jared Della Roca)

there is so much in literature about four in the morning…Shakespeare in ‘Measure for Measure’, Leo Tolstoy in ‘War and Peace’, Charlotte Brontë in ‘Jane Eyre’, Emily Brontë in ‘Wuthering Heights’, Mark Twain in ‘Huckleberry Finn’, Vladimir Nabokov in ‘Lolita’, H.G. Wells in ‘The Invisible Man’, Fitzgerald in ‘Great Gatsby’ and the most famous wake up in literature perhaps, Kafka in ‘Metamorphosis’(Sudhamahi Regunathan)

Charlotte Brontë liked to let her hair down linguistically from time to time. In an unpublished piece of early fiction, she imagines a scene at a horse race in which the owner of the defeated favorite suspects that his horse was doped. Ned Laury introduces an underworld informer, Jerry Sneak—the man who interfered with the horse—but demands: “Who’ll provide the stumpy, the blunt, the cash as it were to pay for the liquor that cousin of mine will require before he peaches?”
This kind of “flash” slang was doubtless not what the Brontë family used at tea in Haworth parsonage; but it was disseminated through magazine articles that offered readers a vicarious taste of vulgar vocabulary. (Sara Lodge)